Rare is the film that, even hours after it concludes, makes it difficult to say for sure who is the hero and who is the villain. I mean, I’m guessing that Michael Fassbender is the good guy in Assassin’s Creed. He does take his shirt off and sling a quiver full of arrows over his shoulder. That would make Jeremy Irons the baddie; he wears a black turtleneck and wordlessly glares from behind plexiglass during medical experiments. But the actions of these two men don’t make things quite so clear.

Irons (playing a character called Alan Rikken) and his daughter, scientist Sophia (Marion Cotillard), are devoted to creating “a world without violence.” Hey, I watch Vice News. A world without violence would be terrific. Fassbender, meanwhile, plays two characters (Callum Lynch and “hooded Spanish guy”) who go around stabbing people. Not nice! But he looks so dreamy (those eyes!) that you want to like him anyway. It’s all very complex.

Midway through the picture, I gave up rooting for anyone—and instead cheered the set designers whose dazzling 15th-century Spanish interiors and cool modern laboratories are, time and again, kneecapped by director Justin Kurzel’s fetish for smoke and dust. Man, nobody can win in this game.

It’s borderline impossible to follow the plot of this incoherent mess of potentially beautiful images, but the general gist goes something like this: Fassbender’s Callum is the direct descendent of a group of cloaked warriors (the Assassins) forever in conflict with the Templars, who have tried for centuries to get mankind to stop harming itself. The Templars’ efforts might succeed if only they had “The Apple,” a silver sphere that, for reasons never explained, will act as a panacea for society’s ills.

O.K., cool. So where is this lil’ gewgaw? Only the Assassins know, because they stole it during Spain’s Golden Age. Today’s Templars (led by Charlotte Rampling) hire Alan and Sophia to capture descendants of the Assassins, hoping to get the relevant info from them. Sophia has created something called the Animus, which, when plugged into shirtless Michael Fassbender’s lower back, sends him “through his DNA” to observe the past. It’s like 12 Monkeys, but with a lot more parkour. (Of note: when the title card says 1492, know that the guy most associated with that year eventually shows up. It’s the only thing remotely predictable in this screwy movie.)

Callum’s journeys to the past begin affecting him physically and maybe mentally. The final act of the film, the only part with any real pop, involves some sort of rebellion. The present-day lab, which mixes old brick with modern cold glass like it’s the redesigned Bellevue Hospital or something, turns into a battle zone between the Rikkin goons and the Assassin descendants.

The sudden rush to violence is pretty unmotivated; maybe they all just want something, anything, to finally happen. It’s very necessary, as all of the action sequences set in the past are devoid of stakes—they’re disconnected from any narrative arc and filled with nameless, random characters. If Michael Fassbender were Bruce Lee or Zoe Bell, and Justin Kurzel were George Miller or Gareth Evans, maybe these scenes would hold our interest as action qua action. As they stand, inelegant and shot with an ugly, digital rust-colored filter, they most certainly do not.

Kurzel’s last picture was an adaptation of Macbeth that competed at the Cannes Film Festival. Assassin’s Creed is based on a video game. But if you want to troll the public with challenging art, you have to come correct. Other than one sequence of close-ups set to thunderous, propulsive electronic music, there’s not much happening here for the cinéaste set or the hoi polloi. As such, Assassin’s Creed is a picture bound to please just about no one.